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Preparing Electronic Resumes

 

 


bulletE-Mailing Your Resume bulletPosting Your Resume on the Internet bulletPreparing a Scannable Resume

How to E-Mail Your Resume

1. After you have created and saved your resume to your hard drive (or someone has done it for you), save it again as a text only file.

  • If you are using Word, you can do this easily by selecting the "File" menu and  choosing "save as."
  • A box will appear with a section on the bottom that says "save as type." Click the arrow in that section and scroll until you see the selection called, "text only with line breaks (.txt). Select that and press the save button.
  • You will get a message that you may lose some of the formatting when it is saved as a text-only file. Click O.K.

2. Close your regular resume and open your new text only resume. Remember, it will have a .txt extension.

3. Your text resume will probably be fairly ugly because you no longer have bolding, lines, or other graphics. Don't worry, it is supposed to look like this. A text only file uses only regular keyboard features, but the good news is that it can be read by any computer or word processing program. So let's clean it up.

4. If you have used tabs and spaces to format your original resume, you will need to re-format this text-only resume. Line up the text on your resume so that everything is flush to the left margin by removing extra spaces and tabs. You can change your headings so that they are in caps, but changing font style or size will not work. Once you have cleaned up the formatting, click the save button after deciding on the name and location of the file.

5. Now that you have your resume in a text only format, you can copy and paste it into e-mail you are sending to a possible employer. Most employers prefer that you do it this way, but you can also send it along with your regular resume as an attachment. That way, employers can always access your resume no matter what word processing programt hey use.

6. To send your resume as an attachment, just click on the "attach file" menu or paper clip icon when you are preparing a new mail message. Locate your resume that you saved. Once you have located your resume, double click it to send as an attachment. Repeat this for each attachment. That's it. If you have any difficulties, let us know. We are happy to help.

Posting Your Resume on an Internet Site

1. On many sites, you can only do this if you have saved your resume as a "text-only" file. See instructions 1-4 above.

2. Go to the internet site you are interested in, and enter the "post your resume" site. Once you have provided your demographic information, there is usually a  section for you to paste your resume.

3. Open your resume, copy it, close it then return to the internet site and paste it in the appropriate location. That's all there is to it.

Preparing Your Resume for Scanning

Most large employers use scanning devices to process all the resumes they receive. You need to be aware of this and how to ensure that your resume has the best chance of being selected.

1. To prepare your resume for scanning, you can use a text-only resume, which is always safe. See steps 1-4 above. You can also prepare a copy of your resume just for scanning.

2. For scanning, you can use various font sizes, bolding, and bullets. However, your font type should be Courier, Times New Roman, Helvetica, Garamond, Universal, or Arial to be on the safe side. Most scanners that send data to a word processing system cannot read graphics, symbols, or lines, so remove these from your resume. It is still best to line your resume flush left.

3. To ensure your resume is selected, you may need to add some information to your resume.

  • First of all, you need to have a job objective. Since an objective is used for filing purposes by these companies to put your resume in appropriate job files, not having an objective means your resume will be trashed. A good job objective is short and lists the positions in which you are interested, like entry-level management, claims adjusting, broadcasting, etc. It is also the first thing on your resume after your name and addresses.
  • Secondly, you need to make sure that your resume contains key words that the employer will use to sort through the resumes. How do you know what these are? Keywords are nouns that describe your skills and accomplishments applicable to your chosen career. Most job announcements will provide information that will help you prepare key words for your resume, but you can also find helpful information on the internet. Here are some nice sources:

4. If you are mailing your resume, be sure it is a laser-printed original that is not folded.

Hopefully, you will be contacted by several employers. If you are not, try modifying your objective or keywords, or come into the office and we will help you review your resume.

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This document is maintained by: Kathleen Bristow (kbristow@csuchico.edu )
Last Updated: September 28, 2007